Cleaning Up the Seedy World of Apps, Facebook Style

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Cleaning Up the Seedy World of Apps, Facebook Style

Ed Yourdon

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News leaked Friday that Facebook will expand more aggressively into the business of recommending mobile apps to people. Using inside information on what apps you already own, Facebook will suggest new apps you might like — and take a cut when you install them.

The planned Facebook service will be one of the most significant attempts yet to steer users away from apps that are merely popular and toward apps blessed by trusted sources like friends. If Facebook succeeds, it will erode the dominance of popularity "leaderboards" run by Apple and Google and embedded in the heart of the ranking systems in those companies' app stores.

In other words, Facebook is positioning itself as a leader in a young, heretofore unsuccessful movement to clean up the app promotion business. App store leaderboards are crude and easily gamed, and have fostered a seedy world in which app-makers pay each other off, spam users, and tolerate porn in an attempt to race up the charts. Apple and Google have made some attempt to police the system, but aren't particularly invested in reform: They make gobs of money no matter how flawed the system is.

"This is a serious issue for the mobile application market," venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote on his blog in October. "[The] leaderboard model makes the rich richer and everyone else poorer. [My startups] are in the 99%, wishing we were in the 1%. "

Facebook is clearly set on becoming the first app store alternative to gain traction. Last month it launched a mobile "App Center," which recommends Facebook-connected apps that your friends like.

Now Facebook will get more aggressive with those recommendations: Rather than waiting for you to visit the App Center, The Wall Street Journal reported, Facebook will begin inserting recommendations right into your News Feed when you use its mobile app. Unlike in the App Center, the News Feed recommendations will only include apps that are both relevant and whose authors have agreed to pay Facebook a fee when the recommendation results in an installation.

The mobile News Feed recommendations will become, as other business journalists have noted, a nice new revenue line for Facebook. But beyond that, they could help break consumers from the mindset that the best app recommendations are the ones they get within the app store.

In other words, Facebook could end up helping competing app-recommendation systems like Discovr, an app-recommendation engine you install on your phone like any other app, or Appolicious, a web-based app recommender.

That would be a good thing says Mike Ouye, founder of game app developer Red Robot Labs, which is working on what it hopes will be a unique and disruptive new app recommendation system.

Ouye thinks people rely way too much on leaderboards to decide which apps to use. "The social aspect is really missing – what are my friends playing, what do I want to play with them," he says.

If people turn more to friends and experts for app recommendations, app makers will have less incentive to try and buy or spam their way to the top of the leaderboards, and that will be good news for users, investors, and app makers trying to build truly sustainable businesses.